Combine first-person punching with liberal doses of mescaline, and you also might be able to design a game as insane as Zeno Clash II. ACE Team brings the weirdness in this beat-'em-up, a game every bit as bizarre as its 2009 predecessor and unfortunately mediocre in the end. Just like the first entry in this wacko franchise, this game is far more memorable for its surreal atmosphere than its artless fighting mechanics. Although the button-mashing brawling zips along quickly enough to be somewhat hypnotic, the main reason to stick around for the eight or nine hours of the campaign is to see what kinds of dengue fever dreams the developers have concocted.
Zen and the art of punching.
As in the first Zeno Clash, you play as a guy named Ghat, who lives in an alternate dimension called Zenozoic, which is populated by all manner of creeps inspired by Hieronymus Bosch paintings. Everything here is off--way off. The plot is completely incomprehensible. There is a good tutorial that walks you through combat, but it doesn't touch on anything else in the game. So you're abruptly dropped into this crazy world without any sort of preamble about what's going on.
You begin by helping your adoptive sister, Rimat (who seems to hate you for reasons never entirely clear), spring this lurching freak called FatherMother from the jail cell that he/she/it was tossed into by a mouthless monarch called Golem. Then you move into an adventure that resists any sort of explanation. It is virtually impossible to sum up what's going on here, even after finishing the eight- or nine-hour campaign that makes up the sole mode of play (which can be played solo or online cooperatively). Even the dialogue is incomprehensible, with the meaning of many lines chopped into bits, and with many assumptions that you've played the first game in the series.
Reality is a long, long way from anything in Zeno Clash II. Landscapes are populated by freakish fauna never seen on this planet, impossible architecture, and outlandish extra touches like disembodied heads and hands on furniture. The entire game has been designed to keep you off-kilter; even basic background details are skewed. Roads run in insane directions. Steps wind around like something from an M.C. Escher sketch. Bookshelves inside buildings are at crazy funhouse angles. Birds are randomly tethered to the ground. Trees sometimes sprout trumpets that alternate between spewing water and blowing bubbles.
Enemies and non-player characters that roam the world tend to be bipedal humanoids, but after that, all bets are off. You encounter elephant men, dwarfs in hoods, three-fingered goons with furry satyr legs, giant bloody creatures that resemble plucked versions of Big Bird, and all manner of deformed monstrosities that combine various human and animal features. It all looks attractively nightmarish, but the strange nature of everything is also intimidating, with so many weird details littering the landscape that the huge levels in the campaign (which is far more open than the more linear levels in the first Zeno Clash) can be needlessly bewildering. This is a particular problem when you have to solve the game's handful of puzzles, because it's hard enough to figure out what things are supposed to be, let alone figure out what you're supposed to be doing in the midst of all this madness.
